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Certain laws serve absolutely no purpose, and these 10 most ridiculous and weird laws in the world are a testament to that. Some actually do have an ulterior motive in that they ameliorate society in a way that is not immediately apparent, but an overwhelming majority are just an opportunity to laugh at the people who devised them.

Firstly, I have to give you a heads-up that most of the laws you read in this article are probably not the most ridiculous that you’ve ever read; you might recall wacky laws that you’re sure you’ve heard of somewhere or the other – except that most of the laws that you see on the internet aren’t really true, or were enforced in the past and aren’t anymore, or simply aren’t verifiable. So let this article also be a lesson to you not to believe everything you read on the internet without at least a vague attempt at debunking it, or checking to see if the information comes from credible sources that you can rely on without being deceived. Without any further ado, I will disprove some myths that I found most frequently during my research, and to my utmost shock, at sources which I believed to be dependable.

According to a vast majority of the internet, it is illegal to flush the toilet after 10 o’clock at night in Switzerland, but that is not true. What is true, however, is that there is a general rental law in Switzerland that is interpreted by landlords in different ways, and whatever rules are set down are usually strictly enforced, and if you happen to have a weird landlord, he or she might impose wacky laws as they see fit. But the toilet-flushing rule is certainly not a general law implemented by the government.

I also found a diverse array of laws apparently enacted in the United Kingdom, but as this helpful article from BBC states, most of them are myths or have now been repealed. If the article doesn’t convince you, this table by the Law Commission hopefully will. The most popular of these fallacies that I persistently came across while traversing the net would have to be that placing a stamp upside down on an envelope is considered an act of treason. Newsflash: it isn’t!

Australia too has had many misconceptions attributed to it, for instance, that only a licensed electrician can legally change a light bulb in Victoria, and that it’s illegal to walk on the right side of the road. News took it upon itself to challenge these myths, and separate, as they say, the “fact from the fiction”.

Some of the laws that we read about that seem utterly ludicrous actually have an understandable basis for their enforcement, if only we attempt to learn about them. They might stem from religious or cultural beliefs that the citizens of that area deem hallowed and sacred, or they might serve to prevent ordinary occurrences that actually prove to be menaces to society in the long run. Take a look at Singapore, which makes an appearance on our list not once, but twice, for its apparently unintelligible rules, but one must bear in mind that Singapore has one of the lowest crime rates in the world, and is venerated for the outstanding level of discipline of its citizens, and that both these situations must have been brought about at least in part by regulations we declare unnecessary. However, certain states like North Korea are polar opposites and only have weird laws because their honorable leaders are or have been total nut-jobs. For more information, check out our article on the 8 most ridiculous laws in North Korea.

To compile our list of most ridiculous and weird laws in the world, we vigorously scoured the internet for some of the weirdest laws we could find, and confirmed that the laws we found are, in fact, enforced within their respective countries. This long and arduous process brought on the debunking that you experienced above! Now onto the 10 most ridiculous and weird laws in the world: